The acoustic sound generated by conventional speakers contains a large degree of distortion due to the physical limitations of the mechanical structure of the speakers. For purposes of this document, “distortion” is used to mean sound pressure level variation as a function of frequency. Therefore, even with high quality audio processing and digital recording, the actual acoustic sound waves reproduced by conventional speakers are typically far from an accurate reproduction of the original sound. In low end to mid-range electronic consumer products, the distortion due to the speaker system is even more pronounced.
Self-adapting speaker equalization systems are presently costly to implement. These conventional self-adapting speaker equalization systems are therefore unsuitable to low end to mid-range electronic consumer products, such as lap-top computers and desktop computers. However, the demand for high quality sound in these systems is unprecedented due to the proliferation of multimedia applications, digital music download and playback, and world wide web multimedia websites.